Mad About Cartoons

Bill Wray is trying to make the transition fine art but is known as a cartoonist, a background painter/ Art director and sometimes animation director. This will be the place he post his ocasional animation and cartooning work and also be a place to bitch or wax sentimentally about cartoons in general. It’s been a love and hate relationship for many years and the long journey may not be quite over.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Monroe The first episode

Back in the late Nineties I was hired to do a new real time strip in Mad magazine with TV writer Tony Barbieri called Monroe. I'm posting the first pencils and the final art. So many changes were made, I re- drew it entirely. I really didn't want to do Mom as clean cut as the editors wanted, so over the years I slowly evolved her back to this version. They never noticed. Monroe got fixed up for the better and evolved more later. I loved that he got real time older until they stopped the aging in his teens. Tony and I were looking forward to him as a young man. The strip was the love of my cartoon life for a long time, we were breaking ground every episode. Then Jenette Kahn The publisher who green light the strip and wanted Mad to have a harder edge left DC and the Paul Levitz conservative years toned the strip down and turned it into a job.Have fun comparing the pages

Mad About Cartoons

Bill Wray is trying to make the transition fine art but is known as a cartoonist, a background painter/ Art director and sometimes animation director. This will be the place he post his ocasional animation and cartooning work and also be a place to bitch or wax sentimentally about cartoons in general. It’s been a love and hate relationship for many years and the long journey may not be quite over.